Baptism on the Rio Cauca – Conversion and Spiritual Cleansing.

Some days you just ask how did this happen and then you realize that everything happens for a reason. Inshallah. Leaving Monteria and the horse farm we all had bikes that were covered in hard mud from the day before.  This day we had decided to split in to smaller groups to avoid having the logistics and time consumption issues of out very large group – it takes a long time to fuel fifteen bikes.

As we tracked along the muddy and flooded Rio Cauca, we could see the beginning of the Cordillera Occidental looming up in our windshields; the very northern tip of one of the three fingers of the Andes that push up through Colombia and end, exhausted, in Venezuela and the Carribean. Along here the good people of Puerto Valdivia have been given a resource to make a living – the natural spring that flows out of the mountain and into the Rio Cauca. There are now dozens of car and truck wash businesses along the road ready to make everybody sparkling – advertising themselves with high pressure jets of water.

A real need met a perfect solution; park five bikes and stand back while they were scrubbed. They are now immaculate and there was no more mud our suits either. 

One of our number, however, took this a little more seriously than you might normally expect. I present Evan Firstman who decided this was not a menial task of motorcycle cleaning but a moment of spiritual cleansing and we all had to be converted.

Then, after doing the nuttiest thing ever, Brother Firstman decides to give a lecture on the importance of common sense maintenance to future spectators of the movie of this trip. Perfect.